


Find someone to love

by EvilWinter



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Adult Tony, Existential Crisis, F/M, Feelings, Gen, Teenage Tony, Tony Has Issues, author has issues too, everything is always about love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-08
Updated: 2014-03-08
Packaged: 2018-01-15 01:08:45
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,779
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1285555
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EvilWinter/pseuds/EvilWinter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Someone important once said that every story in the world is a love story. This one tried really hard not to be (it failed).</p>
            </blockquote>





	Find someone to love

**Author's Note:**

> 'And in the end,  
> we were all just  
> humans,  
> drunk on the idea that love,  
> only love,  
> could heal  
> our brokenness.'  
> -Christopher Poindexter
> 
> I'm so sorry, Tony.

There are very few things about Tony Stark’s childhood that can be described with a word “normal”. Here’s one of those things: at age 14, Tony has his first ever date.

 

He meets her at one of his father’s fundraisers, those painfully dull things where Tony’s brought along to be shown to important people and then left to his own devices for the rest of the evening; Tony passes the time thinking about whatever he’s building at the moment and making cunning attempts to steal grown-up drinks from waiters (his success rate is 63% and he is steadily getting better).

 

She introduces herself and asks him about his interests. Tony, trying to get out of conversation, starts ranting about circuit boards and the future of technology which works every time with girls. Well, used to work, because ten minutes in she is still listening to him talk and showing no sigh of a desire to get away. Tony stops mid-sentence and actually looks at her for the first time. She is pretty, with her dark hair and intelligent eyes. “What’s your name again?” he asks and she smiles at him, like it’s a completely normal thing to say, not offensive at all. Her smile is beautiful. “Anna,” she answers.

 

He will find out later that she doesn’t care for physics in the slightest, she just enjoys listening to people speak about what they love. He doesn’t know that yet, though, and it’s a rare opportunity to talk about his hobbies with someone who actually listens. Tony makes the most of it and by the end of the night he is actually reluctant to say goodbye. So before his father comes to take him away, he asks, with as much bravado as he can muster: “Can I see you again?”

 

She smiles, her eyes glowing with something he doesn’t understand. “Sure,” she says, tells him how to find her. “The day after tomorrow, yeah? It’s a date,” and she disappears into the crowd before he can react in any way.

 

He didn’t mean for it to be a date. In all honesty, the option didn’t even cross his mind. But she is pretty and he is 14, so, really, why the hell not?

 

Two days later he sneaks out of the house and meets up with Anna. Casual clothes suit her way better than the chick dress did; Tony tells her about it, she laughs and says that he’s sweet. They walk through the city without any particular destination in mind and it’s her turn to talk. She says, she is in love with people as a collective. That she enjoys talking to them, listening to them, getting to know them, even just looking at them. Tony stares; this is a completely alien concept. To him people look mostly the same, ordinary and boring. She laughs at his blank look and tries to explain.

 

Every human being, Anna says, is a world in itself, an unsolved mystery. It can only be uninteresting if you look at it briefly, without trying to understand. Everyone is beautiful and endless, everyone deserves your attention. Never in her life has she met someone who wasn’t worth talking to.

 

“I see,” Tony says, even though he has no idea what she is talking about, it’s like she is speaking Chinese or something. He looks at her (her eyes are glowing with something he doesn’t understand) and asks, surprising even himself, if she could tell him more.

 

So she talks at length about people she’s met before, tells him their stories. The stories are mostly about love, both love he can empathize with (Carl, for example, can literally talk about sci-fi for hours; Jane, who loves foreign languages more than she loves her family) and love he has no idea about (Lilly and Curt running away from home to get married; Jack, trying to kill himself because a boy he’s fallen for turned out to be a jerk).

 

Tony wonders aloud if she knows any stories that are not about love. “Of course, no,” Anna laughs. “There are no such stories. If there is no love in your life, why would anyone want to listen about it?” Tony decides to take her word for it and says nothing. Before silence becomes awkward, she asks him then if he’s finished the engine he was telling her about at the fundraiser and the rest of the evening is a blur of techno babble.

 

Later, he walks her to her house. They agree to meet again soon; she kisses his cheek and disappears inside. Tony stands there for a while, feeling strange, as if not entirely himself, and thinks. He’s read, watched and heard enough love stories to know where this is going, the pattern here is one of the most obvious ones: an exceptional boy meets an exceptional girl, they fall madly in love, face challenges together, then get married and live happily ever after (like most unnervingly intelligent children, Tony doesn’t have a lot of real life experience, he doesn’t know just how unlikely he is to get it right on the first try, so that scenario seems to him like something entirely plausible. Don’t worry, he’ll learn).

 

They date for about six months after that. It’s great, really: they both genuinely like each other, spend a lot of time together, eventually she even manages to convince Tony that talking to people less intelligent than him is not a complete waste of time. Well, not always. Maybe. Whatever.

 

But here’s something weird: he doesn’t love Anna.

 

At least, Tony thinks it’s weird. It’s his first experience of the kind and he’s starting to think he is missing something important here. Why wouldn’t he fall for her, really? She is pretty and intelligent, she makes him feel appreciated and when Tony’s with her the world seems less like something he has to struggle through to get back to his beloved machines. For fuck’s sake, it will even make his father happy: she comes from a very good family, the partnership this marriage would bring is beneficial for both sides.

 

So yeah, she’s pretty much perfect. And yet, he feels… nothing. Nothing at all.

 

(Well, no, that’s not entirely true. He’s a 14 year old boy, he feels a lot of things for beautiful girls; but even he is not naïve enough to mistake any of them for love.)

 

As she breaks up with him (her parents are moving to Europe; Anna says the long distance thing is just not worth it), she looks at him expectantly (her eyes are glowing with something he doesn’t understand). He remembers suddenly that weird hot feeling in his chest as she kissed his cheek for the first time half a year ago. He remembers it being there for a minute or so, but he remembers even more clearly that it disappeared never to return and so he wonders if maybe that is what love feels like. He also wonders why it didn’t stay.

 

Tony says nothing. Anna leaves. They never see each other again.

 

It doesn’t trouble him much, though. They just weren’t right for each other, he figures, and that’s that.

 

*

 

Anna leaves, but her beliefs stay with him. For a whole next decade, he honestly (and with growing desperation) tries.

 

He goes out, he parties and he enjoys the hell out of it; he meets people, he talks to people, he learns to charm people. He makes instant friends everywhere (and why wouldn’t he, a young handsome genius, heir to more money than he knows what to do with), and some of them even stay with him for a while (and in Rhodey and Pepper’s case, forever).

 

He compensates for all his lonely childhood years, and then some. That is not the problem. The problem is, he still doesn’t fall in love. Not even once. Not a single stupid crush. Nothing.

 

He dates a lot of beautiful women, _a lot_ of them. And he doesn’t just sleep with them once and forget their names afterwards (not always, anyway), _no_ , he makes an honest effort, goes to actual dates, buys them presents, gets to know them.

 

Mostly, they bore and disappoint him, but he actually enjoys spending time with some of them. Those exceptional ones he tries hard to keep around for as long as possible, hoping against all hope that this one will make him feel something. But they all either sense something’s off (and leave him) or fall in love with him while he still feels nothing (which is so much worse, honestly, he doesn’t know what to do with their love; his knee-jerk reaction is, unsurprisingly, running and hiding).

 

One break up he remembers especially clearly. A girl named Sally, a journalist, all confidence and composure, body of a Greek goddess, eyes startlingly blue. He asks her why (he always does) and she tells him, like it’s something completely obvious, that she’s wasting her time here. Why, he asks again, surprised. Well, she says, still unnaturally calm, you are not exactly a real boy, are you, Tony? You are more like an empty shell of a human being, isn’t that right?

 

He realizes then, of course, that she is not calm at all, that she is in fact heartbroken and hurt and trying her best to get to him with words; but it is already too late, she succeeds. He watches her leave, speechless, and _hurts_ , and spends the next three days in his workshop, having only whiskey for company and feeling better for it. _Not a real boy_ , he thinks again and again, and drinks until he isn’t able to form a single complete thought, and works until he falls face-down on the workbench and isn’t able to lift his head again.

 

Because that – that is exactly correct. Because it has taken him a while to figure it out, but he knows now, that it’s not only love that is missing, no, it’s any and all complicated feelings. He doesn’t (and never did) feel hatred, or envy, or jealousy, or shame. He didn’t cry at his parents’ funeral and he doesn’t miss them (that last one may have more to do with their parenting skills than anything, he didn’t really see much of them while they were alive either, but _still_ ).

 

He _likes_ people around him and that is all he has to offer. Like, he will be sad if they died tomorrow, but he will replace them and life will go on; nothing they can do could ever break his heart or even hurt him all that much. His emotions are shallow, easy to ignore and shut down; even right now, he could just snap his fingers and simply stop having a breakdown, and that fact seriously creeps him out (hence the alcohol, to take the control away from him).

 

 _It is not normal._ Every book he has ever read, every movie he has ever watched, every story he has ever heard _scream_ at him that he must love someone, that it is a required skill for being human, that only monsters feel nothing at all, that it is unnatural to be like him.

 

But he can’t, all right? He isn’t able to, plain and simple. The brightest thing he has ever felt was that minute spark in his chest when he was 14 and a pretty girl, who actually listened to his rants (which nobody else has ever done), kissed him. Only even that wasn’t much of a feeling, really. Not love by any means, just a single tiny spark.

 

That is, apparently, the best he can do.

 

 _What is wrong with me_ , he thinks desperately, the hard surface of a workbench cool against his forehead.

 

He has no answer.

 

*

 

He wakes up on the next morning with a horrible pounding headache, opens his eyes and is greeted by a moving metal hand that chirps at Tony like it’s glad to see him awake. Tony blinks at it stupidly for a while, his mind slowly coming out of its sleepy stupor, and then starts laughing hysterically.

 

That’s right, he’s made an AI last night. He made a machine capable of learning and thinking, basically a mechanical living being.

 

He is not human, is he? No, not human at all.

 

Tony is a _god_.

 

*

 

(He comes down from his laughing fit eventually, of course. He looks at the bot he’s made a little more closely and it’s… well, it’s not all that clever, to be honest. Or useful. Or graceful. Less than anything, that.

 

Tony looks at its code, tries to fix it, but it’s like it’s written in an alien language or something. After two solid weeks of trying, he gives up and moves on with his life.

 

Still, he feels a weird fondness for the stupid thing. He names it Dummy (for obvious reasons) and decides to keep it.

 

And although the bot is probably the most useless and faulty thing he has ever created, he feels, for some reason, better about himself when it is around.

 

He stops trying so hard after that.)

 

*

 

When he is 24 years old, he goes on a business trip to France. He doesn’t remember much about the business-y stuff he did there, only that people he was supposed to make a deal with were completely sure that he is too young to even know left from right, and that the deal was off even before he opened his mouth.

 

He doesn’t like to waste his time and so instead of trying to change their world views he flirts, shamelessly, with the interpreter, a young black woman that smiles at him condescendingly, her lipstick bright red, and after the meeting is over leads him to her hotel room, closing the door with a quiet click.

 

As they lay in her bed afterwards (at 24 Tony doesn’t yet feel the burning need to run away as soon as they stop moving), she smokes and tells him, calmly, looking straight up at the white ceiling, that she is cheating on her boyfriend right now. “Why would you do that?” Tony inquires, indifferently, into her neck. “Because he is a pig,” she answers immediately and they both stay quiet for a little while.

 

“I don’t understand,” he says then.

 

She looks at him. “He is ridiculously jealous and possessive, you see.”

 

Tony smirks. “Seems to me that he has a reason to be.”

 

She smiles lazily. Her teeth are very white. “He didn’t have any until today. Never stopped him from making a scene every time something male even looks at me. We’ve been having these arguments at least once a week lately.”

 

“Hmm,” Tony says intelligently. He doesn’t really get it and doesn’t feel like pretending otherwise.

 

“But the fights alone would have been tolerable,” she continues, slowly drawing circles on the back of his shoulder with her index finger, “but now I don’t look good enough for him”.

 

Tony looks up at her, caught off guard. She is as striking as she was a minute ago, no surprise there; Tony tells her so. “Right?” she says smiling, taking the compliment as her due. “Well, I’m letting myself go, you see. Gaining pounds, not wearing make-up and crazy heels, all that. Not as sexy as I used to be.”

 

Tony doesn’t know what to say to that so he doesn’t say anything. The obvious question hangs in the air, unasked. She sighs and gives the expected answer: “I love him, that’s why. We’ve broken up before and it’s hell, the worst thing that has ever happened to me. I don’t know how he does it, because he is an asshole and he is ruining my life, but it is better with him than without, you know?”

 

He doesn’t know, sees a clear pattern, asks before he can stop himself: “But you see that you are gonna break up anyway, don’t you?”

 

She looks at him as if he’s said something stupid. “Not today,” she says, puts out her cigarette (she didn’t touch it once since they started talking) and goes to the shower.

 

As he lies there alone, he asks himself, for the first time ever: is it even worth it, this “love” thing? Is it what he really wants? Is he okay with going through something like that?

 

Maybe, just maybe, he is actually lucky to be like that?

 

*

 

The thing is, in our culture love has become something of a Deus ex Machina, the answer to everything.

 

In our movies, books and music love cures people from sadness, loneliness, addictions, suicide tendencies, depression, anger issues, sociopathy; it makes people strong and brave, gives them the guts to stand up, to be themselves, to change the world, to be – simply – good. It gives their life _meaning_.

 

“Just find somebody,” the world whispers in your ear. “It will all be fine, you just have to find someone to love.”

 

And although we all know that it is far more likely that said found love will hurt you and probably people around you as well, that it’s inconvenient at best, crippling at worst, awkward and messy in any case; although we know all that, we still dream that someday… someday…

 

Well, Tony just doesn’t have that option, apparently. Lying in someone else’s bed, hundreds of miles away from home, he, finally, accepts this fact.

 

And stops trying.

 

*

 

(It’s amazing how little big decisions like that change your life.

 

It’s not like he will stop sleeping with women or anything. He will probably even continue to date them; it has become something of a hobby of his by that point.

 

And it won’t bring him any peace of mind, not really. Doubting your beliefs and decisions is the only way to grow, after all. Also, Tony and peace of mind? Really?

 

But in an endless war against himself it will give him, for the first time ever, a weapon. And Tony is nothing if not good with weapons.)

 

*

 

Of course, that decision, along with every other one he has ever made, gets tested, heavily, in Afghanistan and, like many others, does not stand.

 

It’s just that... well. It’s just that no one is waiting for him to come back. Nobody will be heartbroken if he doesn’t.

 

Tony has never thought about his life in these terms before. He is not a lonely man by any stretch of imagination, there are always people around and he has friends and lovers, the whole package, but… they are just not close enough for his death to change their lives drastically. And that’s, that’s actually, you know, kinda sad.

 

Yinsen understands, judging by how fast he finds the right spot to strike, to catch Tony’s attention, to start pulling him apart. “So you are a man who has everything. And nothing,” he says and Tony, caught and seen right through, waits for judgment that never comes.

 

Yinsen sees what Tony is, yes (a monster, in more ways than one), but he also sees, with a clarity that Tony himself lacks, what Tony _could be_. Even more importantly, Yinsen believes that this “could be” is something worth fighting for. What choice Tony has, really, other than believing him?

 

And so he makes a decision, the scariest decision of his entire life, that if he gets to live through this, the whole thing will not be for nothing. That he will change – that he will change everything, prove to himself and to the whole world that he is not _an empty shell of a human being_ , that his life is still, no matter what, worth something.

 

Tony makes a decision. Then, he fights.

 

*

 

He keeps the promise and does not go back to the life as it used to be. “Making things right” is a little difficult, as he is very vague on the concepts of right and wrong, but he just works twice as hard to make up for that. He shuts down the weapons manufacturing; it’s good, it’s what Yinsen would’ve wanted, so it has to be the right thing to do.

 

Then comes the vengeance, of course (he’s told killing the terrorists is closer to good than to evil and they really owe him for his nightmares).

 

Stopping the wars is the next logical step: he has the necessary power, money and intelligence; helping people and saving lives is generally considered a good thing, right?

 

 

After that he stops for a moment and thinks: _what else?_

 

Well, there was the whole loneliness issue, he remembers. He tries to get Rhodey into the Iron Man project, fails miserably and suddenly sees that he has no idea how to get close to people. He’s always been trying to keep his friends at arm’s length and it even made sense because a) he didn’t feel the need for closeness, b) he used to consider it troublesome, c) he is generally confused about normal emotions, doesn’t see if he’s making people uncomfortable, is really bad at reading face expressions, and, apparently, d) he has no idea how not to.

 

But then it becomes a moot point anyway. Even Tony is not enough of a jerk to get involved with someone while he is dying.

 

*

 

He tries desperately to fit as much life as at all possible into the time he has left. There is a strange emptiness inside of him that wasn’t there before. He thinks, it’s probably where fear and desperation would’ve been if he was _a real boy_. No way to know for sure, though.

 

He does his best, of course, with trying to find the cure, but it’s not going well. It’s not “going” at all, to be honest. For the first time in his life, Tony thinks, maybe he is just not good enough. Not clever enough to solve the riddle.

 

Or maybe, it, just like Afghanistan, is a punishment. Maybe the universe thinks he is not doing a good enough job of redeeming himself. Maybe it has decided that he can not be redeemed. Tony would agree on that, actually.

 

He gets sentimental exactly once, maybe a month and a half after finding out he’s being slowly poisoned by the device keeping him alive. He gets sentimental and he asks Jarvis find some movie about terminal illness. It would be interesting to see how normal people deal with this kind of things. “Not too serious,” he says to Jarvis, absentmindedly, thinking about chemical elements and power sources, “and not too old.”

 

The movie turns out to be quite average, full of clichés and bad humor, but the dying woman is quite a character (a little like Tony himself, poor thing) so he lets it play in the background while he tinkers on with the reactor.

 

An hour or so in, Edda asks her doctor why must her life be so short and he says with a little unassuming smile, that a dying little girl he’s treated once had a great answer to that question. “Have you ever loved someone? Have you been loved? If you can answer both these questions with a ‘yes’, then your life had meaning.”

 

Tony stops the movie with a clipped order and stares at the screen, the tools in his hands completely forgotten, as if he can’t believe what he just heard. It seems like a betrayal somehow, like a low blow.

 

_Why is everything always about love?_

 

He stares at the screen for a while and desperately wants to break it, but just can’t find it in himself to care enough. At that moment he is aware of the emptiness inside him like never before. Not knowing any other way to deal with it, he goes to fetch the whiskey.

 

*

 

Surprisingly, after the palladium mess everything starts getting better. Not right away, of course, and very slowly, but it does get better.

 

The relationship with Pepper practically starts itself; until the very last moment Tony believes that he is just misinterpreting the signs (because it’s Pepper and Pepper is perfect, and why would she possibly) but for once he isn’t. For once, he manages to get it right. And although he fucks up pretty royally now and again, they make it work. They actually make it work.

 

He starts using his genius for peaceful purposes, he makes smartphones that can be called smart without cringing, satellites, helicopters, bio-reactors, environment-friendly car engines, anything to make the world a better place. It brings good money and makes Pepper proud – what else can you wish for?

 

He makes sure almost half of that money goes to charity (he doesn’t know what to do with it anyway). Another big part of his income Tony spends on Avengers, their food, clothing, housing, weapons, cleaning their messes, etc. He does it at first because it gives him leverage with Fury and later because he grows fond of these weirdoes and enjoys taking care of them.

 

Much to Pepper’s displeasure, he even gets a taste for superhero-ing after a while.

 

Life is finally all right, awesome, even. He feels good about himself, he thinks, no, he _knows_ now that Anna was wrong; he feels proud for being able to change, to find meaning in his life without the incentive of love. He doesn’t feel like most people do, but so what? Feelings are overrated.

 

He doesn’t quite find his peace, but he is as close as he could ever be. He even thinks sometimes, that he wouldn’t mind to grow old like this.

 

*

 

He doesn’t get to grow old like this.

 

He is only 59 when he gets kidnapped without his suit by a supervillain; he breaks out of captivity (Tony has sharpened that particular skill over the years) and manages to destroy the terrible Doomsday device said supervillain was working on, thus preventing the third World War. Unfortunately, something goes wrong and the device blows up, effectively killing both the supervillain and Tony. It is all very heroic and painful to watch (but everyone watches it anyway, judging by how many hits the security camera footage that leaked to the Internet gets).

 

Everyone goes crazy about him for a while. On the day of the funeral a picture of Tony’s young smiling face is _everywhere_ and everyone is talking about what a great man he was and how much he has done for the world. It is completely impossible not to notice.

 

The ceremony itself takes place in a small church out of the city, because Tony has left everything to Pepper, including his company, suits, Jarvis and the right to decide what to do with his body and how to organize the funeral (he knew very well that being useful helps her deal with stress). There are only a handful of people present: Pepper, Rhodey, Happy and Avengers, both old generation (or what’s left of them, anyway) and new. Everything is very solemn and appropriate, completely unlike Tony, but in a nice way.

 

He was never a religious man and so the ceremony is held by a state’s official. The man begins by listing Tony’s accomplishments; it takes a while. Tony revolutionized this, prevented that, helped those, saved those others, on and on the list goes, seemingly endless, getting everyone into a trance of a sort. “A truly great man,” the official says after he’s finally finished reading. Everyone agrees.

 

Pepper is still way too angry at him for getting kidnapped and killed, so she declines the invitation to speak sharply, her tone leaving no room for an argument even though her eyes are very red and she is sobbing. As Tony’s best friend in his last years, Captain Steven Rogers stands up and walks to the front.

 

As everyone’s eyes turn to him, Steve holds his head high and stays silent for a moment. Everyone knows what he is thinking about; Tony is by far not the first friend and comrade the Captain is burying, nor is he, in all likeliness, the last. Everyone respects the man’s quiet sorrow and waits patiently.

 

“Tony was, without a doubt, an exceptional man,” Steve starts, looks at the list the official has left behind, frowns slightly. “And we appreciate everything he has done for the world.” He pauses and takes a deep breath. “But, I think, everyone here will agree that what is much more important is that… that Tony loved us, his friends and family, with all his heart. I think this is all that actually matters.”

 

Everyone does agree. In the picture, Tony’s cocky smile seems a little tight around the edges, all of a sudden.

 

Must be a trick of light, that.

**Author's Note:**

> The movie Tony's watching exists, it's called 'Heiter bis volkig' and it's a German romcom that has a dying sister in it (because those two things obviously go together so well and it's not disturbing at all). On the other hand, that movie has quite literally annoyed me into writing this, so, thank you, I guess?


End file.
